We now live in a globalized world where changing market requirements demand that translators translate into languages other than their own (Stewart, 1999). Indeed, the growing importance of English as the lingua franca of trade, science, technology, medicine and economics means that many Spanish translators must work into English to be successful in an increasingly competitive labor market. For native speakers of Spanish, however, the non-mother-tongue translating process becomes a much more challenging task as it requires the development of specific skills and strategies, such as the greater use of documentation and parallel texts, and can be hindered by the lack of appropriate resources (Hurtado Albir, 2001). Moreover, this type of translation often results in mediocre output that must be revised and corrected. It is therefore essential that translator trainers improve their students’ performance in L1-L2 translation through the appropriate methodologies, and one of the ways to do so is through a corpora-mediated approach to learning to complement the use of dictionaries, lexical databases or glossaries; three of the main tools used by translators and translation trainees. At the same time, such an approach fulfils the principles of contemporary teaching practice; among them the fostering of task-based and student-centered learning, learner autonomy and competences, reflection, hypothesis testing and deduction (Johannson, 2009). With this aim, this paper examines the application of the largest freely-available corpus of English, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), in the setting of an undergraduate Spanish-English specialized translation course. More specifically, it focuses on the methodology used, providing practical examples of basic features of the COCA database applied to common problems that arise in the translation process, such as frequency, synonymy, polysemy and collocations. Finally, some of the limitations and advantages of COCA are discussed based on the results of a survey administered to the students. Keywords: Corpus of Contemporary American English; translation training, specialized translation, Spanish-English translation, translation problems